‘Slowly, but surely,’ Williams replied from the top of the ladder.

He looked healthier. His hair was neater and he had more meat on his fused bones, but Knox could still see the haunted shadows in his eyes.

‘How’s the shoulder?’

‘Can’t complain. Or at least shouldn’t.’

‘Coffee’s ready.’

‘That time already, old man?’

‘Afraid so.’

Williams climbed down as Knox took the tray over to a desk next to a half-collapsed fireplace. Knox pushed the plunger on the cafetière and poured the hot, dark liquid into the two cups, then reached into the desk’s top drawer and pulled out a leather-bound notepad and Dictaphone. He sat down, turned the machine on, opened the pad, and wrote the day’s date at the top of a fresh sheet of paper.

‘Where did we get to yesterday?’ Williams asked as he picked up his cup and sat opposite Knox.

Knox checked the last page on the pad. ‘Minsk.’

This was the other part of Knox’s bargain with Holland. He was his best friend’s carer, jailer, and interrogator.

For the first few weeks of Williams’s incarceration, they’d had regular visits from White and a succession of psychologists who were desperate to work out what combination of drugs, terror, and coercion the KGB had subjected Williams to. White, faced with real, living evidence, had given up his belief that brainwashing was a fantasy and approached his new field of research with his usual zeal.

They’d even had a visit from Laing last week. He’d wanted to tell Knox in person about an old clockmaker who had been killed in his railway arch shop in Shepherd’s Bush Market.

Laing had seen a note about the death in a case round-up the Met had sent to MI5 and felt a hunch. It turned out the man’s bludgeoned body had been found in a workroom full of bizarre mechanical contraptions and technical drawings, including one of a gunsight and a laser welded together in two hollow tubes. Knox was fairly sure Laing would have earned his place back out in Britain’s international domestic intelligence fray by the next time he went up to Leconfield House—whenever that might be.

Now, however, Knox and Williams were mostly left alone to tend to Rabley Heath’s overgrown gardens and dilapidated walls in strange, quiet domesticity. And that, despite being what Knox had dreamed of for years, was the source of the concern that had accompanied him to bed every evening and waited for him every morning for the last month.